To be honest, whenever I play I am always somewhat annoyed with myself when I discover inefficiencies that result in a slight loss of hammers or research compared to optimal play. Its always a battle with myself to try to play without any of the tiny inefficiencies that creep in whenever you arent micro-ing enough and planning each city.
Things that might happen: Using hammers when there is room to grow because of inattention+production focus (growing faster is better in the long-term, most of the time). Not setting production before end of turn, or building the wrong thing.
The strategic flaw in the other game (this one: http://www.twitch.tv/ashtaar007/b/473485784) was the placement of the 4th city on the dyes, which I knew would be extremely hard to defend against galeasses. I chose to do this, because I didn't have the happiness at the time to place it elsewhere without being unhappy, and there was an annoying barbarian camp in the way of the better spot. I should have just waited maybe 10 turns, or optimally not built the settler in the first place.
Since I knew my city was very hard to defend, this caused me to want to attack Carthage before he had galeasses, to hinder him so I would not lose my city later. Thus, a comp bow rush, with some triremes. He chose God of the Sea and used work boats+ a lighthouse, so I blockaded/pillaged them for a lot of time, and threatened his 2nd city. This harass was quite effective, and forced him to defend against it instead of doing whatever economy stuff he had planned. I could not close it out though, because the bottleneck was too much, combined with his Elephant units to stop my composite bows.
I went education first, because my typical plan of metal casting -> education -> whatever would be too slow to stop a galeass rush. Education -> machinery, skipping metal casting in favor of quicker crossbows to fight off the galeass rush.
However, I lost a general during my attack to his first galeass + some elephants (did not expect the galeass!) This general would have built a citadel. This caused my units to get trapped and slain by some elephants, leaving me with a pitiful 3 comp bows to upgrade to crossbows. Built 1 more crossbow by the time the galeasses got there, but I needed a little more, and he got the city.
My entire tech path and gameplan was dictated to me by placing the city on the dyes. If I had instead waited and put it somewhere off the coast (maybe on the sheep hill), I would not have to be so worried about galeasses, and I could instead get my workshops up and running. The increase in production would have made the frigate fight later much easier, and allowed me to keep all my cities healthy. I almost lost when Carthage upgraded his galeasses to frigates and attacked. Luckily, he didn't have much iron. All this pattering about with Carthage should have put me way behind the other continent. Luckily again, they were all stuck in a land war. So when my navy arrived and sacked the coastal towns of my biggest threats, they had no counter. I took one of Shoshone's major cities a little before he got artillery, a Brazilian city, and another power 48 size 20 Brazil city with my fleet. Shoshone and Brazil were my 2 main opponents (they were occasionally ahead of me in demographics). This was due to their error of having coastal cities without a navy to defend them.
Basically, I limited my own options severely by putting a city in a difficult to defend spot, but my opponents made errors too, so I won anyways
